


Dream Brother

by Balder12



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Horror, Mark of Cain, Men of Letters Bunker, References to Illness, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 20:59:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4494492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/pseuds/Balder12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam works a spell from The Book of the Damned to cure Dean of the Mark of Cain.  Gadreel offers unexpected assistance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream Brother

**Author's Note:**

  * For [De_Nugis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/gifts).



> At some long ago point, now lost in the mists of time, this was supposed to be a birthday fic for De_Nugis, who wanted Gadreel and Sam to talk. Happy unbirthday, my friend. Also this story took me forever to write, so it splits from canon in late s10, around 10.19, although it implicitly includes some aspects of 10.21.
> 
> Many thanks to my beta, [the_diggler](http://archiveofourown.org/users/the_diggler/pseuds/the_diggler).

 “Are you a ghost?” Sam asks.  Here in the Veil the visible portion of the Mark of Cain reveals itself as a seed from which a million tiny red roots sprout, penetrating every inch of Dean’s spiritual body.  Sam’s perched on the edge of the bed, trying to pull them out delicately while Dean sleeps, one tendril at a time, but over and over again they struggle against his grasp and slip back into their host.  It’s exhausting, delicate work, and he sees no sign he’s making progress.  It’s like trying to unravel a tapestry that reweaves itself as he goes.

“Are you a hallucination?” Sam asks when the first question gets no answer.  His recent run in with the Werther box reminded him to question the reality of people who showed up where they shouldn’t be.  He keeps his eyes on the Mark.  He’d rather not see his own face looking back at him with a stranger’s eyes.

“I’m an angel,” Gadreel says, with a note of injured pride.  Sam supposes that both “ghost” and “hallucination” are unflattering demotions.

A tendril whips across Sam’s hand, searing like rope burn, and escapes him.  He curses under his breath. 

“That’ll never work, you know,” Gadreel says.  “The Mark can be transferred, but not uprooted.”

Sam tugs on a root embedded in Dean’s forearm.  “No, I don’t know.  The Book of the Damned is ambiguous.  It says the Mark has to be planted in fertile ground.  For all I know that’s literal.  Maybe it can be contained and buried.” 

“It’s not literal.”  Gadreel sounds weary, like he expected more from Sam.  “The curse can’t be destroyed.  You need to plant it in another killer.”

Sam ignores him and begins to unravel the root again.  He’d felt a jolt of horror when he found Gadreel waiting for him in front of Dean’s door, the shock of discovering a stranger in the house when you thought you were alone.  But after that first instant he hadn’t been able to summon the fear, or anger, or pity, or passionately righteous sense of whatever-the-hell it was that he was supposed to feel.  Mostly he’s just annoyed.  Gadreel is a houseguest who invites himself over and never knows when to leave.  All Sam cares about right now is saving Dean, and he doesn’t have the patience to deal with the Ghost of Crises Past hovering over him and criticizing his technique.    

Dean stirs in his sleep and Sam drops the root, heart racing.  According to what he read in The Book of the Damned, Sam’s fully disembodied.  In theory, all Dean would see if he woke is darkness--no helpful, scheming brother looming over him, and no restless, possibly-evil twin lurking in the corner.  But Sam would prefer not to test that.  If Dean senses something is off, Sam’s whole mission could collapse.  If he manages to destroy the Mark he’ll be happy to fight with Dean about the details afterward. 

It’s cold in the Veil, stripped of his insulating coat of flesh and blood.  Sam wonders briefly how his own body is faring down the hall.  If it stopped breathing would he know?  He has no reason to believe it’s in danger, but then he had no reason to believe there was an angel-ghost-hallucination lurking in the shadows of the bunker until he peeled off his skin and went for a stroll through the halls.  God knows what else is hiding in this place that he can’t see with human eyes.

Sam’s doing well this time, the root wrapped three times around his wrist and clinging to his arm, when his vision goes gray at the edges.  He struggles to stay in place, but there’s a tug at the center of his chest that hauls him backward like a bungee cord, and he wakes up back in his own body.  He expects the bed to shake from the force of the impact, but it remains still in the early morning silence. 

Sam slips into Dean’s bedroom to check on him.  He’s still fast asleep and apparently unharmed, if a touch pale.  “Gadreel?” Sam whispers, but he gets no answer.  If Gadreel’s still lurking in this room he’s invisible to Sam’s material eyes.  For all Sam knows his doppelganger’s been with him all along, watching him from the corner of every room.

Dean doesn’t wake up until past ten, when he limps off to the hall bathroom to throw up.  “You feeling okay?” Sam asks when he stumbles into the kitchen.  Sam strains to sound casual, but comes off as panicky and intrusive, even to his own ears. 

Dean hunches over his coffee, the smell wafting off it acrid from sitting too long on the burner.  “Yeah, yeah, I’m Merry-Fucking-Sunshine.”  He squints under the oppressive brilliance of the kitchen light and presses his fingers to his temple.  “Think I picked up the flu on our last hunt.” 

“Maybe you should give your liver a rest for a couple of days then,” Sam says as Dean adds a finger of whiskey to his mug.

Dean grunts noncommittally and takes a gulp of his spiked coffee.  “I’m going back to bed to watch Chuck Norris movies.  Something real goes down, give me a knock.”

Sam watches Dean’s hunched back as he walks away.  Yesterday Dean was fine.  For a man with the weight of the world’s oldest curse gradually chipping away at his soul, Dean was fine.  Sam doesn’t want to take odds that Dean just happened to come down with the flu on the same day Sam started to perform secret surgery on his astral body.  The Book of the Damned said nothing about this, and Sam has no way of knowing how serious it might become.  Is it just a metaphysical hangover, or a genuine threat?  For all Sam knows, Dean’s heart could stop when Sam goes back in tonight.  If he’s going to do this, he needs to finish fast.

He spends the day checking and re-checking the Book of the Damned, but finds no information he missed the first thousand times. He digs out the old EMF meter and explores the rooms while Dean’s in bed, but gets no flicker of activity.  If Gadreel’s spirit is here, if it has been all along, Sam can find no evidence.  Sam was under the impression that angels shepherded human souls, but didn’t have souls of their own.  He’s done no research and taken no precautions against the threat of angel-ghosts, because until now it had never occurred to him that such a thing existed. 

He could call Cas, of course.  Cas would know whether the being Sam encountered last night is even theoretically possible.  _Might_ know.  He hadn’t known Gadreel would leave behind residue until Sam told him; angels seem unsettlingly ignorant about the most basic facts of their own existence.       

Regardless, it’s not an option. “How does the angel afterlife work?” isn’t a question Sam can play off without an explanation, and Cas doesn’t know Sam’s trying to remove the Mark on his own.  Sam’s done dragging his friends into this slow-moving disaster.  Cas hasn’t proven terribly successful at lying to Dean, anyway.

He wonders what’s left of Gadreel’s residue now, and an itchy, unclean feeling spreads under his skin.  That residue could be the root of the haunting, the scrap of matter the ghost is bound to.  Sam saw a woman with a haunted kidney once, why not haunted blood?  That would make a salt and burn . . . challenging.  He and Gadreel would be stuck with each other until Sam’s body went up on the pyre.   

He listens to Dean coughing in his bedroom as he wanders the hallways with a canister of salt, wondering whether he should lay down lines.  That’s the way he was raised to handle ghosts.  If nothing else, at least Sam would know for sure Gadreel’s real if the salt kept him out of Dean’s room.  Except Dean’s going to come out of that bedroom again at some point today and he’ll want answers when he finds a salt line in front of his door. 

Sam abandons the idea.  It wouldn’t tell him anything conclusive about Gadreel.  A hallucination might not cross a salt line because that’s the reaction Sam expects, and a genuine manifestation might be able to pass over it without any trouble.  If Gadreel’s real he’s no ordinary ghost, and Sam knows fuck-all about his limitations.  He clutches the salt canister all afternoon anyway, like it might have some power to protect him.

It’s on his bedside table when he stands in front of the mirror that night.  Drawing the sigils on his chest in bone ash is slow going, every line placed onto his skin backwards in the mirror.  He finds himself expecting his reflection to blink while he watches, but it never does.  There’s no reason to put his shirt on again when he’s done—his body will be staying right there on the bed--but he still does it.  It feels wrong to leave it alone half-naked. 

He lies down on top of the bedspread and chants under his breath.  The Book of the Damned isn’t written in a human language, and he had to memorize the syllables of the spell phonetically.  He can only hope it means what Rowena claims it does.  He supposes the words should feel ominous in his mouth, that he should have some sense of the weight of the magic he’s working.  Mostly he just feels silly, like he’s once again the twelve year old boy who tried to sound his way through the Elder languages in Lovecraft.  The sensation of slipping his body is almost indistinguishable from the twilight edge of sleep: he loses track of the words he’s saying, of what he’s doing and why, and then of the line that divides his skin from the air. 

When he comes back to himself he’s standing beside himself.  The room is the same, but colder and clearer.  The shadows are still just as a dark, but he can see what’s in them now. 

“Hello, Sam,” Gadreel says from his place in the corner.  The way he holds his neck— _Sam’s_ neck—is stiff and unfamiliar, as if he hasn’t adjusted his posture to the line of Sam’s spine.  The eyes are wrong in some terrible way that Sam can’t lock onto, and which he knows will escape him when he wakes.

Sam shudders at the sound of his voice with someone else’s inflection.  He walks toward the door without allowing his gaze to fall directly on the figure.  “If you want to make friends with me, that probably isn’t the smartest form to choose,” he says.

“I didn’t choose it.  You see what you want to see.”  Gadreel follows him down the hall.  “As is your way.”

Sam stops with his hand on the doorknob of Dean’s bedroom.  “Give me a straight answer: are you a hallucination?”

“No.”  A rueful smile flickers for an instant on Gadreel’s—Sam’s—lips. “Of course, I suppose you’ll tell me that’s what a hallucination would say.”  He nods toward the door.  “It’s a spiritual representation.  You don’t need to open it to go inside.”

Sam prefers the comforting illusions that allow him to believe this reality is material.  He wants to open the nonexistent door and walk in, as if it were a normal day.  But more than that, he wants to show Gadreel he’s not afraid.  He walks at speed through the grained wood.  He can only assume the brief ruffle in his stomach is an imagined response. 

“What are you planning to do?” Gadreel asks from behind him.  “Uprooting the Mark didn’t work.”

“We don’t know that.” Sam kneels at Dean’s side as he sleeps.  “I need to try again.”  He glances at Gadreel.  “This is your fault, you know.  At least partly.  If you want to finish your unfinished business maybe you should help.”

“This has nothing to do with me,” Gadreel says sharply, but he kneels at Sam’s side and holds out his hand to catch the squirming tendril Sam’s uprooted from Dean’s elbow.  “Lucifer tricked me into letting him into the Garden.  By the time he seduced Cain I’d been imprisoned for years.”

Sam stops, and the red roots of the Mark slither out of his fist and back into Dean’s side.  “That’s not what I meant.”  It’s so far from any of the reasons it had occurred to him to blame Gadreel that it’s almost funny.  _Would_ be funny, if Dean weren’t lying in front of Sam on the bed, pale and infested. 

“I meant you broke your promise to Dean, stole my body, and used it to kill our friend.  Dean would never have taken the Mark if not for you.”  Gadreel’s betrayal had sent Dean spiraling downward, and so made him an easy target for Crowley in his little war against Abaddon.  It’s the simplest line of causation Sam can come up with.  Simpler, certainly, than the one where Dean took the Mark because he felt guilty about Kevin’s death, which only happened because Sam and Dean made Kevin a prophet by cracking open the Leviathan tablet, which only happened because Cas let the Leviathan out of Purgatory, which only happened because Raphael was trying to destroy the world, which only happened because Sam let Lucifer out of the Cage, which only happened because Dean sold his soul to resurrect Sam, which only happened because Dad sold his soul to resurrect Dean, which only happened because Mom sold Sam’s future to resurrect Dad, which only happened because a gang of angels, none of whom were Gadreel, had been breeding Sam’s family like cattle for generations, which only happened because God went out for cigarettes eons ago, and no one’s heard from Him since.   

Gadreel meets Sam’s eye and gives a small nod, like he’s acknowledging Sam’s point, and goes back to untangling the Mark from Dean’s arm.  The roots give Gadreel as much trouble as they give Sam, encircling his wrist and pinning his fingers together when he tries to pull them out of Dean’s side, or else twisting abruptly away, out of his grasp, and vanishing beneath the still surface of Dean’s skin. 

Gadreel works with the silent drive of a man with something to prove.  Sam nearly forgets he’s there after a while, too focused on his own struggle.  He has a half-formed childhood memory of pulling weeds in the backyard of some shitty rental house, whether as a character-building exercise or for petty cash he can’t recall, and his effort now brings it back: how hard he pulled, the burn in his muscles, the awkward angle of his back.  This is pulling weeds if weeds had a malevolent consciousness, and wrestled you to stay in the ground.  There’s no reason a soul should sweat, but Sam sweats anyway, his fingers raw and exhausted.  As he weakens the roots start to slip under his fingernails or go questing along the vein in his wrist.  The Mark lives in killers.  Sam could be a new host.

This time he recognizes the tension building in his chest before he’s hauled back into his body.  “Goddamn it,” he says under his breath as he looks at the wriggling handful of roots that are all he has to show for his work.  Gadreel has done no better.  A single root has escaped Gadreel’s fingers, and is creeping along his— _Sam’s_ —flannel shirt, probing at the gaps between the buttons, looking for a way in.  Another killer.  Sam grabs it and pulls, but it jerks away from his grasp and disappears into the bedding.

“We might as well try to empty the ocean with a pail,” Gadreel says, and releases the meager handful of roots that are all he’s managed to hold.  “Stubbornness won’t change the laws of God.  You have to plant the Mark in another before you can free Dean.”

“And then what?” Sam can feel himself losing his grip on the flickering reality of the room.  “If I shift the Mark to someone else it will still be out there in the world, still just as much of a threat.”

Gadreel tilts his head, assessing.  “The Mark existed long before you were born.  We didn’t invent murder, either one of us, and it will continue in the world no matter what we do.” He must read on Sam’s face how unacceptable that answer is, because after a moment he adds, “The recipient could be contained.”  Guilt flickers across his face.  Sam recognizes it from all the times he’s seen it in the mirror.

“You mean killed?” Sam says flatly, or means to say.  The tension in his chest snaps him back into bed, and the words comes out of his flesh-and-blood mouth louder than he intended.

Sam checks on Dean as soon as he’s free of his trance, and finds him much as he was yesterday: pale and a bit smudgy under the eyes, but sleeping soundly.  He wakes up an hour later and shuffles into the kitchen with his head hung low, as if he lacks the strength to lift it, and sinks into a chair.  His freckles are dark against his waxy skin.  Sam pours him a cup of coffee and Dean takes it silently, no complaints about babying, no jokes about Sam the Sexy Nurse.  His silence is unsettling, and Sam lays a hand on his clammy forehead.  It’s much too hot, as hot as Sam was when the Trials boiled his blood with fever.  Dean swats Sam’s hand away half-heartedly, and still says nothing. 

He hunches over the steaming coffee and stares down into it, but never lifts it to his lips.  He swallows a couple of times in succession, like he’s repressing the urge to vomit, and stands up, leaving his untouched coffee behind. 

“I’m going back to bed,” he mutters, his head still hanging low.

“I could make you toast,” Sam says, and tries to make it sound like it’s a friendly offer, instead of an agonizingly inadequate apology for unsuccessfully tearing apart Dean’s astral body. 

Dean shakes his head carefully, like it’s a glass that might shatter.  “Nah.  I’m just going to sleep it off.  No pussy virus will keep me down long.”

 For the next couple of hours Sam sits at the kitchen table and stares down into the oily patterns on the surface of the cold cup of coffee Dean didn’t drink.  Where would he find a killer before sundown?  He’s not Dexter; tracking human serial killers has never been his job, and he wouldn’t know where to start.  Worse, he’s not sure he’d have the stomach to kill the recipient when the deed was done, or else the stomach to turn him loose on an unsuspecting world.

The obvious answer presents itself with casual self-evidence.  Sam’s a killer.  He could accept the Mark, pick up the First Blade, and take them both with him into an active volcano.  Surely that inferno would be enough to destroy the Mark, once and for all.  Dean would be healed and Cas would be safe.  If Gadreel’s real then he’d move on to wherever the hell angel-ghosts move onto when the bones are burned.  And Sam would go to Heaven, surely, for freeing the world of this curse.  His death would serve as a penance: if he’d finished the Trials, none of this would have happened. 

Except when has he been allowed to linger in Heaven?  Dean will want him back, and what Dean wants he has a way of getting.  Sam will return, dragging the Mark after him like a ball and chain.  He’ll haul that weight until he can’t, and then more innocent people will die. 

And there’s the fire, of course.  Death has a certain seductive power when it’s abstract:  no more fear, no more pain.  But Sam’s not sweet on the idea of molten lava.  He remembers all too clearly what it felt like on his skin in the Cage.  He’d face it again if it were best for Dean--he needs to believe that--but he can’t help but picture his brother faltering in his absence, reaching out to him through the darkness and tearing the world still more thoroughly apart in a doomed quest to bring him home.

No, the Winchesters can’t be separated, not ever again.  The fates won’t allow it, and the angels tremble at the possibility.  It’s a law Sam can’t fight, and he doesn’t particularly want to.  He and Dean need to stay on the same side of the Veil, and Sam’s not about to push Dean into a volcano.  

What else is there?  Should he walk into Dean’s bedroom tonight and keep unravelling the roots that grow invisibly from his arm?  Gadreel’s right, Sam can admit that much to himself in the dubious privacy of his own head, even if he wouldn’t admit to Gadreel.  No stubborn gardening of Dean’s soul will separate him from the Mark until it has somewhere to go.  Pretending otherwise, sneaking back into Dean’s room night after night to attempt the impossible, is no different from pushing Dean into a volcano.  It’s just slower.

He paces the bunker, staring into empty rooms where Gadreel is hiding behind a curtain Sam can’t part.  After a time his feet lead him to Kevin’s room by a series of evasions and doubling loops that he can pretend are accidental. 

They don’t go there.  Dean must have been inside at some point, to collect Kevin’s personal effects for Linda, but he’s never talked about it.  It isn’t like a suburban home where a dead child’s bedroom becomes a mausoleum, sacred and untouchable.  It’s just that the bunker has hundreds of rooms, and this one is sufficiently far from the hallway Sam and Dean sleep on that it’s easy to pretend it never existed.

The bed is unmade, the rumpled sheets covered in a thick layer of dust.  The desk is a chaos of multi-colored post-its and lined notebook paper covered in familiar writing. The top sheet has a series of doodles down the left margin: a clear cube, a boxy house with a smoke stack, a crescent moon surrounded by five pointed stars trailing off to meet the Latin word for “sky.”  There’s an empty coffee cup perched on the corner, the bottom stained dark with a sticky remnant of the coffee it had once held.  The room looks lived in, as if the boy whose clutter covers every surface might have just stepped away.  

Sam considers taking the mug back to the kitchen and washing it.  He considers packing up the notes and filing them with the other records of the Men of Letters.  They might contain valuable information, and it would be a shame to let Kevin’s work go to waste.  Sam stands in the center of the room for a minute, imagining the simple series of gestures required to square away what Kevin’s left behind, but there’s a sharp pain in the pit of his stomach when he pictures closing Kevin’s notebook, and he can’t bring himself to touch it.  He walks out again without so much as unsettling the dust.

Dean doesn’t come out of his bedroom for dinner, not that there’s much to eat.  Neither of them has gone shopping in days.  Sam hadn’t been sure whether his spirit walks would count as sleep, as far as his body was concerned, but the sting in his eyes and the dull ache in his muscles tells him they haven’t.  He contemplates feeding himself, but boiling a pot of spaghetti feels like it would involve a crushingly vast number of steps.  He’s hungry, but even hunger can’t justify that kind of effort.  Instead he eats a protein bar while he stares at the wood grain in the kitchen table.

In his bedroom, Sam  watches his reflection.  It might as well be Gadreel, but it seems satisfied for the moment to go on pretending it’s Sam.  He could just go to bed.  He could go to bed and sleep, and in the morning it would be like he’d never used the Book of the Damned.  No harm’s been done yet, or none that’s irreversible—no one needs to know what he tried, or that he failed.  No one except Gadreel, if he’s real, but who could _he_ tell?  If he’s real then he’s been with Sam for months without producing so much as a cold spot or a spike in the EMF meter.  As long as Sam doesn’t go spirit walking again, he could safely pretend he never saw what’s hiding in the shadows.       

It would last for a week, or a month, or a year, and then Dean would kill again.  Murder can be put off, but not prevented, as long as Dean has the Mark.  Sam wishes he could believe he’s driven by some deep need to protect the world from the demon Dean will become.  Saving people, hunting things.  But Sam can’t summon more than the most obligatory intellectual concern about the potential victims.  It’s Dean he’s scared for:  that he’ll damn himself, that he’ll disappear inside the monster he’ll become, that Sam will have to kill his brother and then live with it, alone except for his invisible friend.  He digs the bone ash out of his sock drawer and starts drawing on his chest.

“What’s the plan?”  Gadreel says when Sam is standing next to his unconscious body.

Sam gives a noncommittal shrug.  “Keep fighting this thing until I can’t, I guess.” 

Gadreel looks at Sam as if he were mad, but says nothing as he follows him into Dean’s bedroom.  Sam walks through the wooden door without flinching this time, and settles himself on the side of the bed next to the throbbing horror in Dean’s arm.  Gadreel lingers behind him for a moment, and then takes a seat at his side.

“Can you see me when I’m not here?” Sam asks.  He strains to sound casual.  The question suddenly feels vital, and he won’t get another chance to ask.  “Have you ever managed to break through to the meat world?”

Gadreel studies his face curiously, but doesn’t seem to find any hook to latch onto.  “I can see your physical body now and then, as if through water.  My sight comes and goes.  I’ve never been able to move objects.”

Sam nods, and begins to tug at the roots of the Mark.  He meets the same undefeatable resistance as before, as the fierce, delicate limbs wriggle out of his hands to plunge back into Dean’s flesh.  Sam tries a half dozen times, gathering a small handful with each attempt, only to watch them slip away. 

“You see it’s futile,” Gadreel says, not unkindly.  Sam doesn’t respond immediately, still struggling to capture a good fistful of the roots, even for a moment. 

When Sam has what he needs in his hand he says, “Yes, I see.”  He shoves his fist as hard as he can into Gadreel’s chest. 

For an instant Gadreel looks baffled, and maybe hurt, before he starts prying the roots away from his skin.  It’s too late.  The Mark senses a killer, and it burrows down into the familiar soil. 

Sam sees the look of horror form on the face that isn’t quite his own, and feels a pang of regret.  “I’m sorry,” he says, although he’s not at all sure he is, and then he mutters the words that pull the existential ripcord.  He flies backward into his body with a brutal-yet-nonexistent impact that jars him awake, but fails to rattle his teeth the way it should.

He runs into Dean’s room half-panicked, and tears the bedclothes off him while he’s still asleep.  It’s a miracle Sam doesn’t get a gun pointed in his face.  Dean must be truly exhausted. 

“The hell, Sam?” Dean says, groggy and indignant. 

“Show me your arm!”  Sam’s grabbed Dean’s wrist and twisted it around before he has time to react.  Dean’s wearing nothing but a t-shirt, and it’s immediately obvious the Mark is gone.

Dean looks at his skin in wonder for an instant, and then turns back to Sam with hard eyes.  “The fuck did you do?  Did you take it?  I didn’t want—“

“No, no, it’s not on me,” Sam says, and pushes up his sleeves.  He does it with confidence, but it’s as much for his own benefit as Dean’s.  There’s no guarantee Gadreel was real, no guarantee that, even if he was, the Mark wouldn’t run right through his spectral form and into Sam’s murderous flesh.  But the Mark isn’t there, and Sam and Dean breathe a simultaneous sigh of relief.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says for the second time tonight, because it’s the thing he’s supposed to say.  “I found a spell in the Book of the Damned that I thought might save you, and I had to try.”  Dean starts to object, but Sam cuts him off:  “No apocalypse, no one died.” This is all technically true. “Just a simple spell.”

Dean looks him in the eye, but Sam holds steady, wide-eyed and earnest.  And then Dean grins, overjoyed by the sudden reprieve, his questions temporarily swept away.  Sam grins back.  All his sins were worth this moment.

Dean is still unsteady on his feet the next day, weak in the aftermath of the surgery Sam hasn’t entirely admitted to, but he refuses to acknowledge it.  He insists they drive ninety minutes to the nearest real town, where he buys glossy, marbled steaks he cooks up in the oven.  The bunker reeks of meat and garlic for days afterward, and Sam finds comfort in the familiar smell.  Sam trusts the cooking as a sign that Dean’s himself again, far more than he’d trust any test based on iron or holy water.

Sam monitors himself in those first few weeks, studying his own reactions like the psychiatrist he’s never going to see.  He discovers no cause for concern.  The Mark doesn’t bubble up to the surface of his skin, though he checks for it daily like he’s looking for a cancerous lump.  He feels no urge to kill the guy who cuts him off to steal the last parking space at the grocery store, or at least no more than usual.  He feels great, in fact, content inside the chilly cradle of the bunker. Dean is himself, loud and familiar, taking up too much space in Sam’s home and head, and Sam wouldn’t have it any other way.  The shadows that linger even in lamplight are just shadows, and Sam has no wish to see their secrets. 

Cas visits a few weeks after Dean is cured.  Sam hears him in the entryway, his conversation with Dean a familiar mix of cheerful and awkward.  They turn the corner into the library, and Cas freezes when he sees Sam.  For an instant Sam imagines Cas is looking at something to Sam’s left, something standing in the corner just behind him.  The gaze is fleeting, though, or else entirely imaginary, because Sam finds himself staring directly into Cas’s eyes.  There’s a look of silent horror there that’s quickly hidden behind a stiff veneer of angelic detachment. 

The veneer stays firmly in place for the rest of his visit.  Cas behaves as if all the intervening years never happened, as if he’s once again the alien, immovable creature that Sam shook hands with after Dean’s resurrection.  It’s half heart-breaking and half-comforting, this abrupt return to a time that Sam had never expected to miss.  He aches for the almost-friendship that’s been snuffed out, but is relieved that Cas is no longer carrying himself like a lost child who Sam might need to take in.  Sam has no room in his life right now to care for anyone else.

Sam’s tempted to ask what terrible spiritual deformity Cas sees when he looks at him, but he doesn’t.  There’s nothing Cas could tell him that he’d want to hear; nothing Sam could do at this late date to change what he’s done, even if he wanted to.  Which he doesn’t.  Cas doesn’t stay long, and that’s fine with Sam.

During the day Sam works with all the lamps on, the steady drone of podcasts in his ear.  At night he watches old sitcoms, a mixture of light and sound that crowds out thought until he’s able to sleep.  The incantations of the Book of the Damned, once memorized, are with him forever.  He could slip off his skin any time he wanted and take a look around.  In the Veil, he could see into the dark places and look at the consequences of his decision.  He could find out what scared Cas, although he suspects he knows.  He never does it. 

Sam’s happy, or as close to happy as makes no difference.  His human eyes serve him like a horse’s blinders, saving him from seeing what lurks off to the side.  He has no wish to take them off.  Now and then, even safe inside his flesh, he could swear he sees the shadow of wings against his bedroom wall in the small hours, and he wonders what an angel might become, lost in that terrible in-between space; how a grace, once burned out, might be re-shaped by the Mark’s stain.  What it would look like when it finally tore through the Veil.  Then he turns up the television until it drowns out his doubts, and lets the laugh track lull him back to sleep.


End file.
